Longhorn screenshots

[Admiral]

on planet-XP.de

[TdB]

I thought longhorn had a 3d accelerated GUI.

[Gurm]

Nope. Just a rumor, or maybe something that will be added in later.

At this point, Longhorn is looking more and more like Windows XP SE...

- Gurm

[GT98]

Doesnt Longhorn also add in DRM to it and a whole host of other not so friendly things to it in the name of securing windows better?

[DGhost]

Longhorn will have a new rendering engine that uses Direct3D to do a lot of the work. The GUI will also be redesigned, altho that screenshot doesn't show what it will be redesigned for. the screenshots are from an alpha version, which does not have many of the new features (and major changes) implemented yet.

Windows 98 at this stage looked like Windows 95 with IE4 installed. ME at this point looked like Windows 98. Windows XP at this point looked nothing like what it turned out to be. Right now Longhorn is nothing more than Windows XP w/ a couple new things.

[ZokesPro]

I still hope you can change the look to a Win2000 style, I still bon't like their "new" look.

[DGhost]

Originally posted by ZokesPro
I still hope you can change the look to a Win2000 style, I still bon't like their "new" look.

the GUI in Beta1 of Whistler looked absolutely nothing like what the final Windows XP one looks like.

i would make no assumptions off of what its like now because it is going to change.

[Byock]

Yup, so true. I think I like the beta 1 of XP better in some ways.

[WyWyWyWy]

3D accelerated GUI has nothing (well may be some, but not much) to do with the "design" of the GUI.

MS is just gonna use DirectX to render the desktop... so graphics card potential is not wasted when using 2d desktop. And hopefully save some CPU cycles to do more important work...

Anyway, screenshots has been quite sometime now on winsupersite.com...

[Gurm]

Yeah, but the first "verified real" leaked alpha/beta has finally hit IRC, so any screenshots now are gonna be from actual warez pupz.

- Gurm

[Kooldino]

Originally posted by DGhost



the GUI in Beta1 of Whistler looked absolutely nothing like what the final Windows XP one looks like.

i would make no assumptions off of what its like now because it is going to change.

My thoughts exactly. Give it time.

If it already looks somewhat different, it should look VERY diff when the RC's come around.

[DGhost]

There have been screen shots of this build floating around for almost a month now. its old news.

Wy - it probably won't save many cpu cycles. it will allow more effects to be applied to the desktop, as well has having some other nice benefits (page flips only on monitor sync, it keeping track of what the last thing rendered is so if you move a window from the top of it you won't see a white empty window, etc), and will help make alpha blending and other effects faster and easier to do.

the downside is it will be very GPU intensive, and will eat memory bandwidth. a lot of memory bandwidth. and probably GPU cycles.

[Admiral]

Originally posted by ZokesPro
I still hope you can change the look to a Win2000 style, I still bon't like their "new" look.

Can't say that I liked how they rearranged XP either (when I first saw it).
That's why I have the taskbar&start menu, control panel and all other things 98/ME/2k style. Pretty much any animation and fading option disabled and the mouse click response on fast.
The only thing I kept was the new visual style for windows and buttons.
Somehow I like better the bigger minimize, maximize and close buttons it provides.

[Pace]

While it is very possible, I doubt Microsoft are going to leave their new XP interface behind.

The Whistler interface was close to Win2k (and I liked it a lot ), and Longhorn is close to XP. Looks like the taskbar is optional though.

Also, any Parhelia owners with it? Supposedly 10bit colour was to be a feature, any sign of this?

[DGhost]

Oh, Microsoft is doing their best to come up with a new interface. If not to replace Luna from XP, its to supplement it. They have received a lot of complaints about Luna and how it looks horribly unprofessional. I believe the fact that Plex is in there at all speaks to the fact they are designing something as an alternative.

As far as the alpha, it is a very early alpha. Since the XP drivers for the Parhelia don't support any DX9 enhancements yet (they are still DX8 level drivers), i highly doubt that it would support any additional features that Longhorn might possibly have at the moment, such as 10bitRGB support. Even more likely is the fact that these changes will be introduced at the same time as GDI+2.0, which is also not supported by any video card drivers atm.